Postmortem: Beam Runner Hyper Cross

Beam
Runner Hyper Cross (BHX) is a fast-paced futuristic racing
game for the PC. The guys will hate me for spilling this, but the idea
for the game came from Tron. Tons of games have already been made
from the movie Tron, so this may seem a little cliché. However,
we've never seen a game based on the ships that cruised on the energy
beams.

The sail ship from Tron the movie.

We took
this great concept and changed it around a bit: the beams are high in
the upper atmosphere of a planet, curving in great arcs, and running along
each other for a great distance. It's the perfect setup for a race where
you blast the enemy opponents!

From a third
person perspective, you control the speed and rotation of your ship on
the beam while aiming with your mouse. Shooting other players will slow
them down, but keep an eye out for slow moving traffic in your way and
those gun turrets placed to block your path. Do forget to lean the ship
into those curves; you'll go faster that way.

"Too
simple", you say? Well, give us a break — we worked on this
part time over only 4 months. This was a class project for a Game Engine
Design Course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Team
Whoopass consists of five computer science graduate students.

We're happy
to say that members of our team are responsible for the course's existence.
Two of us worked hard to petition for the course. We approached the faculty
with a specific syllabus covering topics in advanced computer graphics
which apply to game graphics engine design. A team project was also included
to give students valuable experience implementing components in a complete
and working engine. We expected that there would be much to learn about
implementing algorithms that work in co-operation with a system, vs. small
isolated implementations.

Early sketch of a beam racer.

The faculty
wasn't too excited about offering a so-called game course. However, they
perked up when David
Eberly, a PhD alumnus of UNC's CS department and author of "3D
Game Engine Design", came back as a visiting professor to teach the
course.

The graphics
topics alone can be found in many computer graphics courses at universities
everywhere, but the project experience is something not so easy to find.

The Engine:
HyperX. BHX
uses our HyperX 3D graphics engine, as well as some auxiliary components.
HyperX uses DirectX 8.0 for rendering, input, and sound. Both BHX
and HyperX were designed and implemented during the Spring 2001 semester
by Team Whoopass.

HyperX provides
interfaces for scene management and display, audio, basic AI, input, resource
management, and more. The user can define custom effects and materials
with no recompilation, and can load models exported from 3D Studio MAX.
Primitives in HyperX include mesh models, billboards, particles, and beams.

It is worth
noting that we used WinCVS
for our source control. This free version control client was crucial in
allowing the team to work on and merge code. Source control is critical
(even for solo developers). Other groups in this class had serious setbacks,
which could have been avoided by using source control properly.